Greg Grandin and Chase Madar: With two days left in his presidency, Barack Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence. Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst currently being held in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth as Inmate 89289, will now be released in May. This is most welcome news, as surely new torments, sponsored by the incoming Trump administration, would have awaited her. According to a recent report by The New York Times, she’s been punished by prison officials for possessing outdated toothpaste (deemed “medical misuse”) and put into solitary confinement as a penalty for the disruption her attempted suicide caused the prison.
In a better world—a world where liberals were willing to protest the militarism of a liberal president—Manning would be a hero, and the material she helped make public celebrated with the kind of enthusiasm that liberals today celebrate the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers gave us context, a step-by-step account of deepening US involvement in Vietnam. Manning’s leaks, as Chase Madar discusses below, are more episodic and fragmentary, but equally important: “a mosaic portrait of two flailing pacification campaigns” in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as insight into other doings of US foreign policy, including diplomatic pressure to keep wages low in Haiti.
Amnesty International hailed the administration’s announcement: “Chelsea Manning exposed serious abuses, and as a result her own human rights have been violated by the U.S. government for years,” said Executive Director Margaret Huang. “President Obama was right to commute her sentence, but it is long overdue. It is unconscionable that she languished in prison for years while those allegedly implicated by the information she revealed still haven’t been brought to justice.” More here.